Henry lingered, shivering in the swelter of the superheated bank. He kept patting at himself—hand to knee, hand to cheekbone, one hand on the knuckles of the other. The first snow was falling on the Nevsky outside, and a filthy quagmire of evil gray was already caking the ground. He had mistimed it. In the past few days he had been forced to use only twice. The sickness was beginning, and he wasn’t sure he could last. He wanted Arkady gone. Go, you bastard, go. He needed that passport bought and paid for. The train left at eight. He needed to be alone, back in his cell, the door barred against himself. Belly full of sleeping pills. He had absolutely no faith in his endurance, nor in his spirit, least of all in the veracity of his intention to actually stop. He had done this only once before, and had lasted less than twenty-four hours. And he was afraid, terrified.
He closed his eyes, seeking other thoughts, another Henry. But for a moment there was no other Henry to turn to. Addiction was his entirety. He was sweating—sweating, shivering, shaking. His last hit had been more than thirty-two hours ago. His nose was running. And the roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums. He bit his cheek. Maybe he should buy one last hit—Leary might even give him some. He wanted wanted wanted wanted. He could not trust himself with this money as far as the end of the Nevsky. Just get home for now. Then maybe buy some. No. No no no no. No, come on, Henry.
The worst of the nausea wave passed and he screwed himself up and stepped through the door. The road was striped from the center with gray sludge—plain gray, dark gray, darker gray, and black gray, churned and squashed and churned again by the endless traffic. The blackest gray at the edge where the exhausts of the filthy buses disgorged their worst. The snow not as a blanket, he thought, but as some kind of blotting paper instead, revealing at last the colors of the truth. He pulled his collar up and his woolen bobble hat down. Buried deep in the inside pocket of the huge greatcoat he wore was the very last of his money and his passport. He would not tell Arkady, but he had borrowed right to the limit of his meager overdraft.
Concentrating on his footsteps—his old black leather Sunday service shoes utterly inadequate, the hole ever-worsening—he walked right toward the river, moving slowly through the crowds on the treacherous surface. Though indistinguishable on the outside from most others passing by, likewise bound in coats and hats and scarves and blinking snow out of their eyes, Henry was thinner now than he had ever been. And beneath his hat he had shaved his head.
He kept his eyes down and stared at the ground. He prayed rosaries by way of trying to claw back some calmness, mumbling to himself, his hands struggling to pat even where he had jammed them into his armpits. The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled gray ice. Pedestrians were squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the earth, it was virgin white.
Arkady’s coat felt unendurably heavy, as though his skeleton might give way beneath its weight. And his bones ached as though they were being gnawed by emaciated rats from within. But the wind —a capricious Beria to Stalin’s steely cold—was coming down the river to tighten the regime (he could feel it now as he passed beneath the Admiralty), and to remove the coat was unthinkable. He had a sudden cramp in his gut and tightened his jaw’s clench against it. He began to shuffle to avoid jogging his stomach more than necessary and to minimize the risk of slipping on his gripless soles. His toes were numb.
At the far side of the little park, he thought he heard someone behind him and turned… He stopped a moment, his jaw working, looking back, standing by the railings beneath the Bronze Horseman, Peter’s mount rearing against the snake of treason. There was nobody. He peered back into the snow, seeking if not the who, then at least the why and the how. But his past was all confused, fretful, restless. He could no longer find the main vein.
But it was there—beneath, beside, between all the other damaged tributaries of the blood, twisting, twining—the thread of his life.
Old Henry, Henry Stuart Wheyland, was the only issue of a loveless marriage, brought up by a mother whose latent Catholic piety rapidly ossified following not a divorce but a parting-of-the-ways trauma into a great and rigid structure of brittle dicta, observances, rituals matched only by the adoration she gave to her one and only holy child. Henry rewarded her with endless exam successes—a flare for chess, for reading, for doggedly enjoying choral music in the face of the wholesale mockery and ridicule of his fellows. He was altar boy and sacristan, teacher’s pet, assiduous student, and seminarian—all before he dared to look himself in the eye.
Then his mother died. Called to Jesus one evening crossing the road outside the junior school, where she had been putting up decorations in preparation for the school play. Called to Jesus by a minibus driver with a belly full of cheap beer, navigating with his knees, one hand pincering a cigarette, the other clamping to the side of his head a cell phone in which could be heard the recorded voice of a woman promising all callers that her pussy was getting wetter and wetter.
And that was it for Henry. The gates opened, and ready or not, real life came swarming through. Faith was quickly revealed as a farce, belief a beguilement, the whole religious enterprise simply a mighty and mesmerizing distraction from the heart of existence. A colossal and redundant folly. The crisis was not a crisis, it was the termination. He had an audience with his bishop and told him that he could not go on.
Continuing to live in his mother’s house, he retrained as a teacher. He read and read and read. He traveled alone to London—to concerts, spending his tiny inheritance on tickets, modest meals out, solo gin and tonics. Two years later he was qualified and teaching at a comprehensive school. But he was nervous, awkward, jittery, and the children could smell his fear. They savaged him. He drank cheap wine in the evening. His classes were a joke—the only quiet pupils were those who were openly doing their homework for another subject. He considered it a success if he could get through the week without any physical violence in his class. He started to drink at lunchtime. His afternoon rages quietened the children for a while. And he resorted to forcing them to read aloud. But still they mocked him, by breaking off whenever they felt like it. Emily Bront&edie; sucks fat donkey ass, they said, what was the point? And he could not remember what he was supposed to say in response. Perhaps they were right: perhaps she did suck fat donkey ass.
He sold his mother’s little home in the real estate boom, he paid off her little mortgage. He added the sum to her little legacy and set off for Asia, relatively rich. Good for at least as many years as he could see ahead, assuming he wasn’t profligate. And for a while it worked. He was born again. He was still young enough, and nobody suspected the failed teacher, the seminarian, the skinny priggish schoolboy.
Through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, then by plane to Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, from Egypt to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Greek islands for a summer; then back east to India—India east, south, west, and north, an odyssey within an odyssey. He acquired the dusty disguise of the traveler And for a time, at least, the chugging contentment of momentum was his. A quiet beer on the go from noon where possible, his sipping spirits where not.